Day 26: Surprised by Lewis: Confronting Chastity and Rigid Boundaries (17th August)

 

The Reading Today

• Daily Theme: Chastity, "Bent Appetites," and the Scope of Christian Morality
• Source Material: Mere Christianity

My Reflection

I have often admired C.S. Lewis for his sharp logic, clarity, and deep empathy. However, today’s excerpt from Mere Christianity brought me up short. For the first time in this reading journey, I found myself in profound disagreement with him.

Lewis opens with an uncompromising definition of Christian chastity:

"The Christian rule is, 'Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.' Now this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong. One or the other."  

To support this, Lewis uses his famous analogy of the striptease versus a plate of food, arguing that sexual instinct has expanded into an appetite far beyond its primary biological purpose.

While I fully agree that mutual fidelity and trust form the bedrock of any loving relationship—and having learned in my youth the pain that betrayal can cause—Lewis’s absolute binary feels restrictive and blind to reality.

Writing in the 1940s, Lewis operated within a rigid framework that ignored those who chose not to marry, those unsuited to it, and crucially, those who were legally and culturally forbidden from marrying at the time. To suggest that anyone outside a traditional heterosexual marriage must resign themselves to lifelong abstinence reduces complex human love and companionship to a cold theological rule.

As a gay man, I found myself wondering what Lewis would have said had we met. Would he have prescribed a life of silent celibacy and constant repentance?

To parody one of his most famous titles, today I was genuinely "Surprised by Lewis." Yet perhaps the real value of engaging with classic literature is not in agreeing with every sentence, but in bringing our honest, authentic selves to the conversation.

Why This Matters

Fidelity, care, and mutual responsibility remain vital foundations for lasting relationships. However, moral systems that rely on rigid exclusions often fail to recognize the genuine love, commitment, and dignity found outside narrow historical definitions.

My Action for Today

Today, I will practice holding space for honest disagreement, valuing integrity and personal truth while maintaining a commitment to fidelity and respect in all my relationships.

Reader Question

How do you handle encountering ideas in classic authors that directly clash with your personal identity or values?